Genetic and environmental effects on brain development across the lifespan and corollary impacts on cognition

Research Summary

Research in the lab focuses on gaining a better understanding of the respective impacts that genes, environment, and their interaction have on brain development and the corollary consequences that these impacts can have on cognitive ability differences.

Examples of currently pursued work:

*Examinations of associations between brain structure and cognitive ability
*Examinations of associations between cigarette smoking and brain cortical thickness
*Examinations of association between corticosteroid levels and brain structure
*Examinations of the interplay between genes and early child environment on brain development

Over the years, we developed multiple local and international collaborations that allowed us to conduct research on large datasets. For instance, in collaboration with Edinburgh University, we work on the Lothian Birth Cohort of 1936 for which cognitive ability at age 11 and exhaustive genetic, behavioral, physiological, morphometric, and brain imaging data at ages 73 and 77 are available for more than 600 subjects. In collaboration with Dr. Michael Meaney, we have recently set up a new wave of data acquisition on the Maternal Adversity, Vulnerability and Neurodevelopment (MAVAN) cohort using multimodal brain imaging (i.e. structural, diffusion-weighted, and resting state fMRI).